The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A data storage system may include various removable and non-removable storage devices. The storage devices may include both volatile memory devices and non-volatile memory devices, such as a hard disk drive (HDD), an optical storage drive, and a removable solid-state drive (SSD) with flash memory.
The flash memory of a storage device may store metadata. The metadata may include logical-to-physical address entries, which are used to convert logical addresses from a host to physical addresses of the flash memory. A control module of the SSD may access locations in the flash memory based on the physical addresses determined according to the metadata.
During operation of the data storage system, the metadata is updated and stored in volatile memory of the SSD when user data is read from and/or written to the flash memory. The metadata is transferred from the volatile memory to the flash memory when the data storage system is powered down. The metadata that is transferred to the flash memory is reloaded into the volatile memory when the data storage system is powered back up. This allows the SSD to maintain an updated mapping between logical addresses and physical addresses of the SSD.